Mind Shark

I'm reading a book. The Raw Shark Texts. It's odd, but a lot of the ideas in it are mine. The author could not have known this. I have yet to speak of them or write them down. The way that the human mind works is in concert with its environment and within society. So, it's no surprise that in the information age, two people had the same idea that information itelf might be alive and possibly conscious.

In the book, the information takes on a sort of physical body to do its work. Bad work. Evil work. Leeching off the minds of people, eating their personalities and memories. My idea, though no less sinister, is more psychological in nature.

Take the song that gets stuck in your head. It's in your neurons. It's lodged there, somehow. Phrases in language become part of the lexicon, sticking in our minds and taking over space in our reality. Even our wants and needs are ideas. We don't spend most of our day hunting and gathering anymore, and so the needs become more materialistic or cerebral. They're in our head.

Addiction is a physical need coupled with a psychological fixation on some object of desire. Everyone is mildly addicted to something. They answer a deep seated craving that they believe will fill a need by seeking their object of desire. A drink. A new gadget. A victory in a sport or game.

In many of us, we become slave to this desire, this addiction.

Sometimes, it's not an addiction, but an ideology that gets stuck in our heads. We believe in one way of living or thinking or acting and we stick to it. Sometimes, we defend it or fight for it. We start wars for them.

In the age of information, a curious new form of fixation has come. Ideas and concepts that mean very little, but occupy our minds as fiercely as any addiction. Memes. Not th corney 50 question memes, but the weird viral packets of self replicating information we pass along.

They work like jokes. You hear a joke, you tell it to another. But these aren't jokes. They're bits of information, easily spread through the open media sources like the internet or text messages or phones. Some are true, some are false. Some survive and breed, some don't and there's not much but informational darwinism that decides which make it and which don't.

Advertisers have taken advantage of this for close to 50 years. Bombard a population with messages until one stick. Ba da ba ba ba! I'm lovin' it! HUH??? Why that?

But the new form of meme is not designed with a product in mind. It's not even designed. Someone pits a bit of information up on a site and people get infected with it. LOL Catz, for instance.

Some are more dangerous. Snopes, the debunking site, is filled with page after page debunking some of these memes. Rumors, medical warnings, political sabotage, urban legends, lifestyle warnings. Dure, these things have always existed, but...

It used to be for a meme to take hold it had to spread person to personin daily contact. Only the strongest ones survived and lasted. Things like "It's every person's dream to get married and own a house."

Now, anyone can write something or film something and put it up on the internet and it can spread. This new informational medium allows alternet informational viruses to spread and find spots in our brain.

The danger is real. It might have already happened. The right combination of ideas, visuals and words might be enough to infect a population. I'll leave that open for your interpretation.